My Marketing Guru = William Strunk, Jr. (with editorial aid from E.B.White)!

I’ve recently completed several marketing communications assignments that were also tremendous fun, almost like play. Part of that playfulness for me is feeling free and comfortable in the task at hand. This lead me to wonder about how this developed in me, which got me considering when I actually started to “learn” marketing, and by “learn” I really mean:   when did this sense of how to craft persuasive messages become less about thinking and more about reflexive, muscle memory?

As I noodled this over I realized that the little marketing flames in my mind were not ignited in the first technical writing class I took in grad school (the first time around) nor were they kindled when I was the bumbling, journeyman account officer for my first real ad agency gig in Colorado.  It was waaay before that – I was a high school freshman and had picked up The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. & E.B. White, hoping to crib some mnemonic ideas for some bad grammatical habits before the PSATs .  In that slender collection of rules and principles were the keys to the marketing kingdom; especially the second section:  “Elementary Principles of Composition”.  Therein lies much of marketing communication’s discipline, framed to look merely like standard writing guidelines.

All this nostalgia for The First Law of Sequence of Tense has risen like a Godzilla of sourdough because I’ve been thinking about this construct of marketing as storytelling; in that viewfinder Strunk’s principles fairly leap out and scream:  good communication tells a story.  Period!

So I’ve decided to take this clunky, little theory about Strunk as my marketing guru a little further – i.e. push the metaphor until it pops like – things that pop – and actually translate Strunk’s rules into their marketing analogues. There’s ten of them so this is post #1 of 10:

Choose a suitable design and hold to it

This principle is all about positioning – the position of a (pick one): company, product, service, is the combined result desired from all the messaging, an ersatz suitable design (aka goal) for all the forms of communication with the target, be they (again, pick one): prospects, customers, investors, regulators. Since the mid-1980′s, with the increasingly urgent focus on quarterly results, I see this principle sacrificed over and over. Such decisions reek of desperation and degrade the accrued value of the brand that all prior marketing spend targeted.

The frequent objection to this is “we don’t want to be limited to one position because we have more than one (and again): product line, audience segment, marketing need. Alas, the issue is with the term “position”. Your position is not the specific words with which you communicate to all those audiences. The position is about what “rung of the ladder” (thank you Trout & Ries) you want occupy in your target’s mind. Splicing the language of your communications so that you convince your various audiences to do your bidding is a task for messaging and other marcomm activities. But your position is the gyroscope that levels all communication properly. Think of it as the CEO of your communications strategy: you don’t actually want her/him speaking to prospects…but they supervise and influence how you speak to them.

Well that’s all for now I guess. Next time I’ll address Strunk’s principle “Make the paragraph the unit of composition.” How the heck is that about marketing, you ask? As soon as I figure that out you’ll be the first to know!

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